It was at the Watkinson library that Whorf became friends with the young boy, John B. Carroll, who later went on to study psychology under B. F. Skinner, and who in 1956 edited and published a selection of Whorf's essays as Language, Thought and Reality.

Also in 1937, Whorf and his friend G. L. Trager, published a paper in which they elaborated on the Azteco-Tanoan language family, proposed originally by Sapir as a family comprising the Uto-Aztecan and the Kiowa-Tanoan languages —( the Tewa and Kiowa languages ).

In a series of published and unpublished studies in the 1930s, Whorf argued that Mayan writing was to some extent phonetic.

Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf came to be seen as the primary proponent as a result of his published observations of how he perceived linguistic differences to have consequences in human cognition and behavior.

In 1953 psychologist Eric Lenneberg published a detailed criticism of the line of thought that had been fundamental for Sapir and Whorf.

The Languages of Pao is a science fiction novel by Jack Vance, first published in 1958, in which the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis is a central theme.

The SSRC awarded Whorf the grant and in 1930 he traveled to Mexico City where Professor Robert H Barlow put him in contact with several speakers of Nahuatl to serve as his informants, among whom were Mariano Rojas of Tepoztlán and Luz Jimenez of Milpa Alta.

Among Whorf's well known examples of linguistic relativity are examples of instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in English and other European languages ( Whorf used the acronym SAE " Standard Average European " to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of the less-studied languages ).

In a popular 1940 article on the subject, Whorf referred to Eskimo languages having several words for snow.

*: The article on Whorf states " Drawing on Nietzsche's ideas of perspectivism Alfred Korzybski developed the theory of general semantics which has been compared to Whorf's notions of linguistic relativity.

Whorf taught his seminar on " Problems of American Indian Linguistics ".

The son of Harry and Sarah ( Lee ) Whorf, Benjamin Lee Whorf was born on April 24, 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

Having been told what the plant produced, Whorf wrote a chemical formula on a piece of paper, saying to the director: " I think this is what you're doing ".

Because of the promise shown by his work on Uto-Aztecan, Tozzer and Spinden advised Whorf to apply for a grant with the Social Science Research Council ( SSRC ) to support his research.

Whorf took Sapir's first course at Yale on " American Indian Linguistics ".

Whorf took on a central role among Sapir's students and was well respected.

Sapir also encouraged Whorf to continue his work on the historical and descriptive linguistics of Uto-Aztecan.

Whorf credited Naquayouma as the source of most of his information on the Hopi language, although in 1938 he took a short field trip to the village of Mishongnovi, on the Second Mesa of the Hopi Reservation in Arizona.

In 1936, Whorf was appointed Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology at Yale, and he was invited by Franz Boas to serve on the committee of the Society of American Linguistics ( later Linguistic Society of America ).

He was a Lecturer in Anthropology from 1937 through 1938, replacing Sapir, who was gravely ill. Whorf gave graduate level lectures on " Problems of American Indian Linguistics ".

has argued that in this report Whorf's linguistic theories exist in a condensed form and that it was mainly through this report that Whorf exerted influence on the discipline of descriptive linguistics.

Many of his stories, such as Gulf, If This Goes On —, and Stranger in a Strange Land, depend strongly on the premise, related to the well-known Sapir – Whorf hypothesis, that by using a correctly designed language, one can change or improve oneself mentally, or even realize untapped potential ( as in the case of Joe Green in Gulf ).

Empirical research into the question has been associated mainly with the names of Benjamin Lee Whorf, who wrote on the topic in the 1930s, and his mentor Edward Sapir, who did not himself write extensively on the topic.

Drawing on influences such as Humboldt or Friedrich Nietzsche some European thinkers developed similar ideas to those of Sapir and Whorf, generally working in isolation.

Though influential in their own right, these strands of research have not been given much attention in the debate surrounding linguistic relativity, which has tended to center on the American paradigm exemplified by Sapir and Whorf.

But the reputation he had during his lifetime belies this idea: his academic peers at Yale University considered the " amateur " Whorf to be the best man available to take over Sapir's graduate seminar in Native American linguistics while Sapir was on sabbatical in 1937 – 38.

Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated an actual hypothesis, Brown and Lenneberg formulated one based on a condensation of the different expressions of the notion of linguistic relativity in their works.

As Whorf became more influenced by positivist science he also distanced himself from some approaches to language and meaning that he saw as lacking in rigor and insight.

While Sapir never made a point of studying directly how languages affected the thought processes of their speakers, some notion of ( probably " weak ") linguistic relativity lay inherent in his basic understanding of language, and would be taken up by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf.

This line of interpretation suggests that a more sympathetic reading of Whorf would lead to a greater understanding of the subtleties in Whorf's use of terminology and consequently to resolving some of the apparent self contradication noted by Whorf's critics.

It is perhaps of interest that the test and exemplification of this in The Form of Information in Science ( 1989 ) vindicates in some degree the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis.

Whorf described a workplace in which full gasoline drums were stored in one room and empty ones in another ; he said that because of flammable vapor the " empty " drums were more dangerous than those that were full, although workers handled them less carefully to the point that they smoked in the room with " empty " drums, but not in the room with full ones.

It is these two formulations of Roger Brown's which have become widely known and attributed to Whorf and Sapir while in fact the second formulation, verging on linguistic determinism, was never advanced by either of them.

Moreover the European languages which gave rise to the creole languages of European colonies all belong to the same subgroup of Western Indo-European and have highly convergent grammars ; to the point that Whorf joined them into a single Standard Average European language group.

Whorf graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1918 with a degree in chemical engineering where his academic performance was of average quality.

Whorf said that " of all groups of people with whom I have come in contact, Theosophical people seem the most capable of becoming excited about ideas — new ideas.

In addition to Nahuatl, Whorf studied the Piman and Tepecano languages, while in close correspondence with linguist J. Alden Mason.

Whorf took a special interest in the Hopi language and started working with Ernest Naquayouma, a speaker of Hopi from Toreva village living in Manhattan, New York.

More than any other linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf has become associated with what he himself called " the principle of linguistic relativity ".

He did not address the fact that Whorf was not principally concerned with translatability, but rather with how the habitual use of language influences habitual behavior.

* The unresolved issue of linguistic relativity ( associated with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf but actually brought to American linguistics by Franz Boas working within a theoretical framework going back to European thinkers from Vico to Herder to Humboldt ).

Along with McLuhan, Postman, and Anton, media ecology draws from many authors, including the work of Harold Innis, Walter Ong, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Eric Havelock, Susanne Langer, Erving Goffman, Edward T. Hall, George Herbert Mead, Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Gregory Bateson.

Along with Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herder was one of the first to argue that language determines thought, a theme that two centuries later would be central to the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis.

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